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New York judge slams NYC MTA in AFDI free speech ruling

Aug 30, 2012 7:17 am By Robert Spencer

Pamela Geller has a full report over at Atlas Shrugs:

…Last September, the MTA had refused to run our ad, “In any war
between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.
Support Israel. Defeat jihad,” because it
said that the ad violated its policy against displaying “images or
information that demean an individual or group of individuals on account
of
race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, gender, age,
disability or
sexual orientation.” Apparently they thought it was demeaning to jihadi
savages who celebrate the murders of Israeli civilians. They had no
issue with not one but two seperate vicious anti-Israel ad campaigns
that were running in the NY subway system and the NYC Metro line.

We won our case in an historic landmark ruling. On July 20th, AFDI triumphed in our lawsuit
against the NYC MTA’s ban on our
pro-Israel ad. Judge Engelmayer, in his injunction, barred the MTA from
enforcing this standard against us, on free speech grounds. We won on
all points. First Amendment rights straight down the line. Judge
Engelmayer wrote a wonderful opinion. Brilliant. And AFDI is now on the
law books. Read it here. Download Opinion. Huge props to AFDI’s legal warriors, David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise of the American Freedom Law Center.

However, the MTA is still fighting against the First Amendment. They
got a stay against the initial ruling. The case was scheduled to be
heard again today, and it was. Rather than in chambers, it was in open
court, primarily because the MTA wanted the court to extend the stay it
granted for 30 days for two reasons: pending appeal and to give it time
to change its regulations. We, on the other hand, had asked the court to
convert the preliminary
injunction forbidding the MTA from enforcing its “demeaning” rule
against our ad into a permanent injunction, a declaratory judgment that
the
MTA’s regulation banning ads they deemed to be “demeaning” was
unconstitutional, nominal damages ($1), and ultimately,
MTA payment of our attorneys’ fees.

There was a phalanx of security guards outside the chambers. It seems as if they were expecting unruly
crowds. Silly, that’s for leftists and Islamic supremacists.

The
hearing amounted to a one-hour cross examination by the increasingly
frustrated judge of the MTA’s General Counsel. The MTA’s two litigators
on this case were
on vacation, so the top law dog for the MTA was James Henly, who was arguing the MTA’s case along with his deputy, Helen Fromm. Henly did all the talking, and boy, was he
on the hot seat. He had no real arguments. The court agreed with our
arguments on the issues raised across the
board.

The judge drilled
the MTA, and it was absolutely clear what his ruling was going to be. Since his initial ruling, the MTA board had not met even once
to try to put in
place some interim new regulation that would attempt to prohibit all
“demeaning” ads, as opposed to
its existing regulation that the judge struck down, which banned those
that they judge to demean on the basis of race, nationality, etc. (Even
if they had adopted such a new regulation banning “demeaning” ads on
some new basis, we believe that would have been unconstitutional, too.
But their failure even to try didn’t make the judge inclined to grant
them any favors.)

Also,
the MTA lawyers could not even assure the judge that any new regulation they had proposed would actually be
adopted, much less provide some idea of what they were thinking about doing about the ruling against them, since the
Board has not even met.

The judge
said that he would extend the current stay until he ruled, and that we should
expect a ruling by the end of the week. But instead, the judge issued a ruling before the end of the day.

It was a slam
dunk
. Judge Englemayer was angry. He ruled with us on all
counts. And look at what he does to the MTA’s General Counsel! And
that’s not just any lawyer, but the Senior MTA in-house lawyer.
Engelmayer orders him to do
his job, as if he wouldn’t do it unless he was ordered to do so:

There is much more. Read it all.

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Filed Under: free speech, Useful idiots


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